Are the Youngest Children in Families the Most Rebellious?

There is a popular belief that the behavior of children in a family depends a lot on their birth order. First-born children are supposed to be fairly conformist, because they do not have to compete for their parents’ attention and resources at the start of their lives. They presumably have a favored status that leads them to identify with authority. Middle children have to fight hard for attention, and so they may rebel as a way of getting noticed. This effect should be mixed for the youngest in a family: On the one hand, they also have to compete for attention. As the youngest, however, they may get some amount of attention just for being the last child.

This idea has also been put forward within the psychology community. For example, Frank Sulloway's popular book, Born to Rebel, essentially made this case.

Some data have been collected that support this idea: In typical analyses, researchers find large-scale surveys that measure rebellious behaviors in teens (like drinking, marijuana use, and nonviolent crime) and then look to see whether birth order in families predicts the delinquent behavior. The typical finding is that middle children are the most likely to exhibit these behaviors, and that first-born children are least likely to display them.

The problem with these analyses is that they are typically done between families. That is, the children all come from different families, and so it is hard to know for sure whether birth order is the true cause of the effect or whether some other variable, like parental involvement in the family, is causing the observed relationship.

A paper in the August, 2013 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletinby Patrick Cundiff found a data set that allowed him to tease apart these effects. He analyzed the Add Health survey that was collected on school children from 1994-2008. This survey collected information about a variety of children’s behaviors. The survey also contained a lot of data about siblings within a family—and it had information about potential confounding factors like socioeconomic status, grade point average in school, and parental involvement in the home.

Cundiff did both a between-family and a within-family analysis of the data. The between-family analysis used all of the children in the sample (over 14,000), while the within-family analysis used only the data from the 3,800 children whose entire family was observed.

The between-family analysis showed the same effects as previous research—that middle children were about 33% more likely to exhibit delinquent behaviors than first-born children. Last-born children were about 20% more likely to exhibit these behaviors than first-born children. Examination of a variety of other factors, like grade point average, and aspects of families, like parental closeness, did not eliminate the effect of birth order.

However, when the data set looked only within families, the relationship between birth order and delinquent behavior was sharply reduced in size and was in fact no longer statistically significant. In this analysis, only gender and parental involvement had a reliable effect on behavior. That is, boys were more likely to engage in delinquent behavior than girls, and children with a low level of parental involvement were more likely to engage in delinquent behavior than children with a high level of parental involvement.

This paper is consistent with a growing body of evidence suggesting that there are few reliable effects of birth order on children’s behavior. Thus, while it is intuitively reasonable to think that first-born and later-born children differ, it does not look like that is really happening.

This article is very interesting. I have always been a big believer that birth order effects a child's behavior. I think it is all based upon how much attention each child gets. I find it true that first born children do not seem to be as rebellious and I agree that not always having to compete for attention is a very reliable and good idea as to why they aren't as rebellious. Middle children and younger children have always had to compete for attention so they could end up rebelling. This holds true in my family and I am the youngest of two. I was always more rebellious and more likely to do things I wasn't suppose to because the only attention I ever got was if I did something bad where I felt my older brother got attention from my parents for everything.

I do believe birth order does have an effect on how an individual behaves, but whether an individual is rebellious or not is based on how the child is raised and the influences around them. One would think that the first-born would be less rebellious because there is no one else to compete for attention. When the next child is born, I believe the first-born would feel the need to compete. The first-born would now have to share their parent's attention and affection with another child. With this being said, would this be reason for the first-born child to be rebellious, instead of the other way around?

Supporters of birth order seem to think that all first borns are alike, and all middle children are alike and all youngest are alike. The personalities and strengths and weaknesses of first borns are different as can be from each other. I'll explain.

First, why is birth order important? Well, before birth order psychologists and lay people alike believed that children in the same family had a shared environment and that the differences in personality were caused by genetics. If the child was naughty or stubborn, they got that trait from one parent or another. This idea is still believed today in all the genetic behaviorism that is so popular. Anyway, Alfred Adler came along and said that children don't grow up in shared environments because the first born grow up in a different environment than the other children.

What is common among first borns is that they once had all the attention of their parents, and then someone else came along they had to share the attention with. It is a problem proposed to the child that he answers by his reaction to it. He or her reaction is their birth order effect and it has as many different outcomes as their are first borns, but there are two major groups: those that adjusted well, and those that didn't, and by adulthood, most of the issues that arise have been dealt with, with small undercurrents of birth order effects.

The second born enters the world with a pacesetter: the first born. The second born's reaction to this is their birth order effect. They, if they feel they can overcome the first born will compete directly on the first born's turf, if not, they will become interested in gaining attention through another field. If the first born is the "smart one", the second is likely "the athlete, or if they are also the last born - they will be labeled the baby. If another child follows, they too will be "dethroned" but usually the effect is to a lesser degree than the first born's as the second born has always shared attention with another child.

The last born is usually labeled the baby, and they are never dethroned, but have only pacesetters, and examples of what to do and not to do. If in a good situation, the last born will be left to their own devices and sometimes surpass the other siblings learning from their mistakes, or become a tyrant who controls the whole family with their demands.

Of course all this stuff is subjective to the family and will likely not be able to be objectively measured. This doesn't mean that its not important. Talking about birth order with patients is a good way to understand how the patient deals with problems. Understanding the typical birth order also give the psychologist a frame of reference (since Adlerian psychology is a comparative psychology that contrasts socially useful behavior with self serving behavior) to see where the child made missteps in logic and social interest. Patients also are very willing to talk about those challenges and is a good starting point for evaluations. Adler never treated patients without discussing their birth order.

So to sum that up - it is not personality that birth order predicts, but situations that the child finds themselves in, that must be answered, not with words, but seen through their actions. The first born always must deal with dethronement, the middle child with having a pacesetter and to a lesser degree, dethronement, and for the youngest, having only pacesetters. Any other claims are likely to be unscientific, or broad generalizations that may or may not work for the individual.